One of those days

Barely an hour ago, she was watching the birth of the aurora of April’s first Wednesday. She had always been intrigued by Wednesdays; they were a kind of downtime in which the whole week rested. She got out of bed a few minutes before dawn and went straight to the backyard. Once there, standing up and facing the horizon, which was about to break with the imminent sunlight, she heard the singing of birds that inhabited a nest right in front of the house and thought just how much she hated them. So small, so helpless, so vulnerable, so dependent on God. But that was irrelevant, the irrational hatred was caused by the simple fact that they could fly. The heat of the sun brought her out of her thoughts, since she was standing there for more than forty-five minutes.

Today she felt anxious. She entered the house, went straight to the kitchen and placed the old and careless fret on the stove. Today she felt anxious. She took a cup and poured some of the black and aromatic liquid that was in that old, ramshackle artifact. Today she felt anxious. Calmly she lifted the small green porcelain container with its large cursive letters shouting "coffee" and noticed that her left hand was trembling. Today she felt anxious. She went to the bedroom and walked to the piano by her bed. She wanted to undo her nerves by playing something, but she did not find a song that would convince her. She only saw happy colors in their notes, and today she was not in the mood for major melodies.

Hamlet, the cat, watched her from the bed as she walked towards the  bookshelf and took out one of Benedetti's inventories. She opened it randomly, read the first verses of a poem under the title of "Invisible":

Death is waiting for me

she knows in what winter

even if I don't

“Death is waiting for me”, she repeated.

April... April... April. It's spring outside, but her life was a winter. She returned the book to the bookshelf and immediately  drew Bécquer's rhymes:

When can I sleep with that dream

where dreaming ends!

Reading these lines alone made her remember Shakespeare: to be or not to be; to die, to sleep; to die, perhaps to dream. She looked at the cat with these thoughts  in mind and smiled. For some reason, she had named it Hamlet: white as the snow of Denmark, blue eyes like the firmament of a hot summer afternoon in a Caribbean island, crazy personality and rare variations of mood that made her want to kill it, sometimes. Yes, to kill the cat. To kill Hamlet.

Towards three in the afternoon, she felt a strong tightness in her chest; her hands were still trembling and  she began to sweat like a pig. She received a call from a friend: "Would you like to go somewhere?" "Today I do not feel very well, another day will be". She tried to calm down and she failed.

It was five o'clock. She went back to the backyard, listened once more to the tweets of the damned birds as she contemplated the sunset while making an analogy between her and the sun: "Both of us involuntarily rise at dawn and fall down each afternoon". But not anymore. She entered home, opened the Bible and wrote down the first verse  she read, fed Hamlet, took a knife…
Watching  its mistress sitting on the sofa, Hamlet went towards her and laid down on her lap; the blood began to dye his fur. White snow from Denmark, she thought, grinning grimly.

At dawn the birds sang while the rays invaded the room abandoned by the cat,with a dead body on the sofa and a piece of paper falling slowly from the table with only five words written on it:

“I loathe my own life”.  -Job 10:1